September 28, 2007

this warms my geeky heart

Aww! But… er… “On our fourth date, I knew I had found the kind of dork I could love” …? On my list of romantic sweet nothings, this ranks somewhere between “Your pit hair is so silky” and “I love the way you make moist chewing sounds.”

The clue for 111 across in yesterday’s Boston Globe Sunday magazine crossword puzzle was “Generic Proposal.” The answer (spoiler alert, for those still working on it!) was “Will you marry me?”

Photo of the lucky couple after the jump.

Most puzzle devotees no doubt just moved on to the next clue when they solved that one. But for Aric Egmont of Cambridge, those 14 letters on the grid were the actual proposal he’d been plotting for months to his girlfriend, Jennie Bass.

Egmont, 29, who works in the communications department at Fidelity Investments, contacted the magazine this summer to ask if the people who create the puzzles would be willing to write a special one for him. Sunday mornings for he and Bass, he said, have always included tackling the Globe magazine crossword, a tradition that started early in their relationship.

“On our fourth date, I knew I had found the kind of dork I could love,” Egmont wrote in a note to the magazine. “We had already had some more adventurous outings. But on our fourth date we just went to the local coffee shop and did the crossword. That date was the first moment when we stopped relying on some kind of event to set the agenda, and instead we took that first tiny step towards normalcy, spending time together doing the same things we would regularly do on our own.”